39 posts categorized "News Trends"

March 29, 2011

As a Michigander, I am familiar with the sad tune the media has been singing about Detroit. So I was not surprised when I read an article by John Wisely and Todd Sprangler in USA Today with the headline, "Detroit suffers 25% loss, population lowest in 100 years."

The USA Today version of the story is more comprehensive then most of it's competition. It also highlights a former resident, giving a human voice to the story, which is good.

One Michigander to move out was John Bessette, 44, who grew up in suburban Detroit and moved to an exurb of Pittsburgh in August 2010 after commuting there for almost two years. His company, Aim Construction, builds medical facilities and wanted to be where that field was growing.

"With the economy, even before the bad times, everybody was tightening up their purse strings," in Detroit he said. "It was really a good time to go look at somewhere else."

November 15, 2010

There was good news for Newsweek this week. It was announced Friday that the Daily Beast and Newsweek would be joining forces in an effort to keep the 77 year-old publication afloat in a time where it seems all but the most elite magazines and newspapers are shutting down.

Yet again, Keach Hagey, Politico's media reporter, set off to report the story from the media angle, and found that there was a little publication that never seemed to get mentioned in all of the coverage of the merger, Newsweek.com.

In her Politico article, Hagey set out to discover the missing piece of the Newsweek/The Daily Beast merger. Unlike last week's stellar analysis of the Keith Olbermann controversy at MSNBC, this piece about Newsweek is full of vague quotes, anonymous sources and quotes from other publications; three things that seem to have been embedded in my brain as either last resorts, or completely off-limits.

Hagey begins the article by stating her thesis as though she were writing a research paper:

It looks like Newsweek.com might be the unwanted stepchild in the marriage between Newsweek and the Daily Beast.

Amidst all the fanfare about what Tina Brown’s print turnaround skills will bring to the faltering Newsweek, and what Newsweek’s print advertising inventory will bring to the not-yet-profitable Daily Beast, there’s been no clear message on just what will become of Newsweek’s own digital property, which brings in twice as many unique visitors per month as the 2-year-old Beast.

This is great. It's clear, she states her purpose and throws in a fact to frame the rest of the article. The problems begin after the first quote:

Staffers were told that the two websites would merge, but were not sure about whether that effectively would mean the end of Newsweek.com. Some were certain that, at the very least, it would mean that Newsweek’s digital team would be moved off of its very unpopular content management system, into the Beast’s nimbler software. But, as The New York Observer’s Nick Summers, who broke the story of the merger, reports, there are also fears that layoffs are in the offing among the digital team.

Hagey, where did you get this information? Why did you decide you don't need to cite something like this? If some Newsweek staffers told you, then you should say so, or if staffers told another news outlet, then cite it, but you can't just make a statement like this without any sort of citation to back it up. It discredits the whole point. I could see how she might be getting her information from The New York Observer, but her wording is still far too vague to safely assume so.

Not only does she use vaguely cited facts, but she also uses anonymous sources:

Newsweek has 250 staffers, by Colvin’s count, and the Daily Beast has 70. The cohabitation is set to begin some time after the first of the year, according to sources at the Beast, in Newsweek’s new offices in Lower Manhattan.

Come on Hagey, you can do better than this. Your article about MSNBC last week was so good, so when I saw this, my expectations were set really high. But when you only have one, maybe two sources that you actually talked to, and the rest of the quotes in your article coming from other publications, you're just doing lazy reporting.

November 14, 2010

Last week I was sent to the Supreme Court to cover oral arguments on a video game restriction law in California. The hearing was actually quite entertaining and I was excited at the chance to write a story about it.

As usual, before I turned my article in to my editor, I checked to see how other major publications chose to write about the arguments. The story that captured my attention the most was one in the New York Times.

This article had a good balance of serious and intrigue. The Court that day had been in rare form, and those watching broke out into laughter on more than one occassion - mostly on account of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia.

“Some of the Grimm’s fairy tales are quite grim,” he added. “Are you going to ban them, too?”

While the NYT article provided adequate background information, it added an extra element that is missing in a lot of journalism today: human interest. There is certainly a fine line between making a story interesting and editorializing, but I think this article is an excellent model.

I didn’t spend four years day-dreaming through math classes about becoming a journalist so that I could compete with celebrities and 16-year-olds with a smart phone.

What is going on?

More importantly what can we do to revert the attention to the actual news media? There is such an availability of mediums and information that I’m beginning to wonder what being a journalist is going to mean when I graduate. I also feel like I have no right to complain because I still have a fighting chance. There are people in news rooms who have spent their post-grad lives making a name for themselves and now have to compete with me; a kid with less experience but a better understanding of converged media.

December 03, 2009

We learned in class the 'secret' theory to a strong news article, and the first few steps involves creating the first four paragraphs to be the strongest building blocks for the rest of the story. An article in The Independent, James Murdoch Signals Reduced Role for His Family's Newspapersby Stephan Foley, is an excellent illustration...of what NOT to do.

Though I still struggle with those building blocks myself, I could tell that Foley had yet to discover that secret (!!) theory. That and dictionary (or heck, spell check); his article had five spelling errors, two of which were in the lede! Take Foley's second paragraph though:

Rupert Murdoch, son of Australian newspaper owner, built News Corp into one of the most formidible newspaper businesses in the world, owner of The Times and The Sun in the UK and, since 2007, The Wall Street Journal in the US. But at an investor conference in Barcelona yesterday, his son--who is now chairman of News Corp's businesses in Asia and Europe--said that the company's newspapers and journalism would decline in importance.

November 02, 2009

If anyone has been following the growing trends of news gathering in a town with vanishing newspapers, it's Tammy La Gorce. After reading her article from New Jersey Monthly, 'How News is the Future of Reporting in New Jersey', it made me want to click on a new window tab on my browser and google to see if my city had it's own hyperlocal web site.

'Hyperlocal' web sites have been popping up in cities across the U.S for a few years now; The New York Times' latest report on the trend was April of this year, and Gorce's article researched the site going back as far as 1997, from a community city web site in Maplewood, NJ.

October 29, 2009

August 03, 2009

On July 24, the Chicago Tribune printed a mournful column, lamenting the death of the Ann Arbor News. Unlike many other cities, the death of the Ann Arbor News is the death of the only major news source in the area.

The News was not just a hometown paper for the 114,000 residents of this university town about 45 miles west of Detroit, it was the hometown paper. Ann Arbor has become the first American city of any size to lose its only full-time daily.

But perhaps understandably (less so for the many journalists sitting in the seats), they are starting from the ground up. The editors are trying a business model that has been semi-successful for other digital news outlets: small staff, small circulation, niche advertising (see AnnArbor.com--oh and the top story this morning is dead swans).

About This Story
This article was reported jointly with Jeff Gerth of ProPublica, an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. ProPublica is supported entirely by philanthropy and provides the articles it produces, free of charge, both through its own Web site and to leading news organizations.

What does it mean when an advocacy organization can write for the Washington Post? "Hey yeah, Woodward, we want you to do this investigative piece on theft of campaign documents. We're going to team you up with a journalist from the Heritage Foundation."